b,
Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
Hid from the world in a low delved tomb."

The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a
little in the _Ode_, after which they are for ever put aside by
Milton's imaginative severity and high conception of poetry as a finer
sort of truth than prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying. Once,
and perhaps once only, one hears in it the voice of the Milton of later
years--

"Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."

But with the _Ode_ the age of imitation is over for Milton and he
stands forward at once {99} as himself. The soft graces, somewhat
lacking in outline, of the _Fair Infant_, are forgotten in the sonorous
strength of the _Ode_. The half-hesitating whisper has become a strain
of mighty music; the uncertain hand has gained self-confidence so that
the design now shows the boldness and decision of a master. At once,
in the second stanza, he is away to heaven, with a curious anticipation
of what was to occupy him so much thirty years later--

"That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council-table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay."

Milton's genius was universal, in the strict sense of the word, that
is, living in or occupied with the universe. He is as supramundane in
his way as Shelley in his. And no part of the universe was more real
to him than heaven, the abode of God and angels and spirits, the
original and ultimate home of his beloved music and light. It is
noticeable that there is hardly a single poem of his--_L'Allegro_ and
_Samson_ are the only important ones--in {100} which he does not at one
point or other make his escape to heaven. In most of them, as all
through this _Ode_ and the _Solemn Music_, in the conclusions of
_Lycidas_ and _Il Penseroso_, in the opening of _Comus_, this heavenly
flight provides passages of exceptional and peculiarly Miltonic beauty.
The fact is that, though little of a mystic, he was from the first
entirely of that temper, intellectually descended from Plato, morally
from Stoicism and Christianity but more from Stoicism, which cannot be
content to be "confined and pestered in this pinfold here," disdains
the "low-t